Hi xrok1 - to tell you the truth I would recommend using some other software for creating this shape, specifically I think a subdivision surface style modeler would be a better choice because it seems like you have very sculptured style model there. Your form is not driven so directly off of just simple profiles which is the easier thing to do in MoI.
It is possible to create that shape in MoI, but it will be quite a lot of work and it will be a lot more difficult to control subtle details of the shape.
Subdivision surface modelers are much more oriented towards sculpting type methods, by which I mean editing points in 3D space instead of in a more 2D profile driven way.
That's also why a digitizing arm would also help a lot since it would be easier to create a lot of traced 3D curves with it, which instead you will have to do in a much more painstakingly manual manner by adjusting every single point to a spot that you have to judge. This is difficult to do.
It's even difficult to easily describe the kind of steps that you would go through since a large amount of it is little subtle fiddling with point placement, like dragging points up a tiny bit, over a tiny bit, down in z tiny bit, adjusting some more, etc.., etc.., etc...
Anyway, here is about the best that I can do to describe it without spending days working on it...
To start with, I placed your bitmaps in the top and side view, and traced a curve in the top view over a part of the grip, placing control points at fairly regular intervals:
Then I turned points on, and switched to the side view, and dragged points up to make a profile that matched the upper part of the grip in that view - here you can see that in progress, each point is dragged straight up in the z direction until the curve is following that upper shape:
I then made a copy of those 2 curves (with ctrl+drag), slid the copies downward:
Then I started doing the same kind of point dragging but this time downwards:
I duplicated those bottom curves inwards and then did quite a bit of additional point manipulations, sometimes stretching the ends of the curves outwards and adding new points in with Edit/Add pt. After a bunch of little adjustments to different points, I ended up with this curve framework:
Then I decided to Loft through these, turning on the Closed option, to generate this surface:
It's certainly not a perfect result as-is - it might take quite a few more hours or maybe even days worth of tweaking and adjusting points, and possibly creating additional profiles before you could really get it nailed down. You also have to kind of have a feel for how the surface is going to behave when it is generated through these curves.
But that's kind of the process that you would go through to create a sculptured type surface that's not so blocky and more of a curving 3D shape.
Those curves and surface are attached here as grip.zip .
A subdivision surface style modeler is built more to work with surfaces like these, in that kind of software you will work more directly on the surface and they have tools that are very much more oriented towards adjusting points of the surface around in 3D space more so than MoI.
This just is not the kind of "simple model done quickly and easily" type of thing that is really the main focus of MoI version 1.0 .
- Michael